Bertha May Crawford

She built an international reputation as a lyric coloratura soprano in the early 20th century in eastern Europe, performing prima donna roles with opera companies in Russia and Poland between 1914 and 1934.

[1] She is remembered as having "a high lyric soprano of great beauty and agility" and was best known for her performances as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Violetta in La traviata, and Gilda in Rigoletto.

Schuch Opera Singers,[10] and in November 1907 she entertained at the annual concert of the Loyal Orange County Lodge of Toronto at Massey Hall.

[11] During the summer of 1907 she appeared at the Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia,[12] and she toured briefly with a concert party on the lyceum circuit in the southern United States in the spring of 1907.

During the fall and winter of 1909-10 and 1910–11, Crawford joined the H. Ruthven MacDonald Concert Party for five-month tours of the cities and small towns of western Canada.

The company criss-crossed the Prairie Provinces appearing in halls, churches and theatres in communities from Winnipeg, Manitoba,[14] to places like Lethbridge,[15] Red Deer,[16] Crossfield,[17] Claresholm[18] and Frank, in Alberta.

However, her first spell in Poland was interrupted by the First World War and Crawford left Warsaw for Russia ahead of the German advance on the Eastern Front in late 1914.

In February 1915 she debuted at the Narodny Dom (People's House) in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in a performance of Rigoletto opposite baritone Jacob Lukin.

[22][24] She sang in Petrograd through to April 1914, performing in Rossini's Barber of Seville, and in La Traviatta singing in both Italian and Russian and audiences found her voice "rich, melodious and ringing" and her acting "bright and spontaneous".

[25] By March 1917 when the Russian revolution broke out, Crawford had come back west to Helsinki, Finland and she did not return to Petrograd until after the Bolsheviks took power in the fall of 1917.

She came home as a star with an international reputation and performed her first recital in Canada in ten years to a sold-out audience at Grant Hall, at Queen's University in Kingston, in October 1921.

On November 9, 1921, she sang selections from Rigoletto and Dinorah and reviewers commended her "pure light soprano voice, with an exceptionally good middle register...her florid work was finely finished..."[37] and her "almost perfect intonations...and wonderful breath control and versatility of technique.

"[38] On January 29, 1922 she sang with the Canadian Grenadier Guards Band at His Majesty's Theatre in Montreal,[39] and in an April recital at Massey Hall she sang numbers by Antonio Lotti and Veracini, and Rimsky-Korsakoff, and "astonished her hearers by the perfection of a long sustained trill proceeding from pianissimo to forte, and the dying away almost to the vanishing point, and then renewed with fresh brilliancy.